Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Peloponnesian War trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Peloponnesian War set Athens and its Delian League against Sparta and the Peloponnesian League from 431 to 404 BC. It began with Thebans attacking Plataea and Spartan kings marching into Attica, was reshaped by a plague that killed Pericles and a third of Athens, swung to Athens at Sphacteria, paused with the Peace of Nicias, and then broke Athens in Sicily and at Aegospotami once Persian gold built Lysander a fleet. Thucydides, exiled for losing Amphipolis, wrote it all down — until his text stops in 411 BC and Xenophon picks up the thread. This quiz covers the causes — Corcyra, Potidaea, the Megarian decree and the debate at Sparta — the Archidamian War and the Long Walls, Cleon and Brasidas, Mantinea, the massacre at Melos, the mutilated herms, Alcibiades's defections, the fortification of Decelea, the Four Hundred, Cyzicus and Arginusae, the Thirty Tyrants and the symbolic peace the mayors of Athens and Sparta finally signed in 1996. Fifty questions, four options each, with a short explanation after every answer. Play on your phone or print it for a history quiz night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Between which years was the Peloponnesian War fought?
431–404 BC
The earlier 15-year conflict of 460–445 BC is known as the First Peloponnesian War.
Q 02Athens led which alliance in the war?
The Delian League
It took its name from the island of Delos, where the allies originally kept their treasury.
Q 03Which foreign power's intervention on Sparta's side in 413 BC tipped the war decisively?
Persia
Darius II ordered his satraps Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus to collect overdue tribute and make war on Athens.
Q 04The opening phase of the war is named after which Spartan king, who invaded Attica in 431 BC?
Archidamus II
Ironically Archidamus had spoken against the war in the Spartan assembly; the hawkish ephor Sthenelaidas won the vote.
Q 05Athens suffered a major defeat by Thebes at which battle in 424 BC?
Delium
It came a year after the Athenian triumph at Sphacteria.
Q 06The treaty of 421 BC that paused the war is known as the Peace of whom?
Nicias
It lasted six years but was marked by constant skirmishing around the Peloponnese.
Q 07Which Sicilian city did Athens try to conquer in the disastrous expedition of 415–413 BC?
Syracuse
Its people were Dorian like the Spartans; the Athenians and their Sicilian ally were Ionian.
Q 08Which Spartan commander built a Persian-financed fleet and won the decisive battle of 405 BC?
Lysander
Unusually he was not from a Spartan royal family, and he cultivated the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger.
Q 09The naval battle of 405 BC that broke Athenian power was fought where?
Aegospotami
Lysander destroyed 168 ships; only 12 Athenian vessels escaped, some carrying the general Conon to Cyprus.
Q 10What was the Spartan-installed oligarchy that ruled Athens after its surrender called?
The Thirty Tyrants
Thrasybulus overthrew them and restored democracy in 403 BC.
Q 11Who wrote the main historical source for the war, the History of the Peloponnesian War?
Thucydides
An Athenian who fought in the early years, he was exiled in 423 BC and wrote from the Peloponnese.
Q 12The main historian's account breaks off abruptly in which year, seven years before the end?
411 BC
Xenophon's Hellenica picks up directly from his final sentence.
Q 13Which younger historian continued the main account of the war in his Hellenica?
Xenophon
A mercenary who fought for Sparta and retired there, his account is generally considered favourable to Sparta.
Q 21Athenian trade sanctions of 433/2 BC against a Spartan ally are known by what name?
The Megarian decree
Thucydides largely ignored it, but some economic historians call it a contributing cause of the war.
Q 22Which hawkish Spartan ephor's view prevailed over the king in the 432 BC war debate?
Sthenelaidas
The assembly voted that Athens had broken the peace, essentially declaring war.
Q 23The war's first attack, on 4 April 431 BC, was a Theban strike on which Athenian outpost?
Plataea
Plataea had been the site of the great Greek victory over Persia fifty years earlier.
Q 14Which Roman-Greek biographer wrote Parallel Lives of four of the war's commanders?
Plutarch
Plutarch's focus was on character and morality, but he preserves details recorded nowhere else.
Q 15Which Athenian comic playwright set Peace and Lysistrata during the war?
Aristophanes
They are comedic fiction of little historical value, but they reflect civilian life in wartime Athens.
Q 16What did the war's main historian call the ~50 years between the Persian Wars and this one?
The Pentecontaetia
During it Athens turned an anti-Persian alliance into a tribute-paying empire.
Q 17In 465 BC Sparta dismissed an Athenian force sent to help suppress a revolt of whom?
The helots
Sparta feared the 4,000 Athenian hoplites might switch sides; the offended Athenians repudiated the alliance.
Q 18The First Peloponnesian War ended with which treaty, signed in the winter of 446/5 BC?
The Thirty Years' Peace
It lasted barely fifteen years before the alliances were at war again.
Q 19Athens made a defensive alliance with which sea power, a colony at odds with Corinth?
Corcyra
A small Athenian contingent at the Battle of Sybota kept the Corinthian fleet from taking the island.
Q 20Athens ordered which Chalkidiki city, a Corinthian colony, to tear down its walls?
Potidaea
Corinth secretly smuggled defenders into the besieged city, breaching the Thirty Years' Peace.
Q 24The Long Walls connected Athens to which port?
Piraeus
Citizens of Attica abandoned their farms and crowded inside them during Spartan invasions.
Q 25Spartan invasions of Attica normally lasted how long, so soldiers could go home for the harvest?
Three weeks
The longest, in 430 BC, lasted just 40 days; helots at home also had to be kept under control.
Q 26In which year did the plague that killed Pericles first strike Athens?
430 BC
Between a third and two-thirds of the population died, and Spartan troops refused to invade a plague-ridden Attica.
Q 27Roughly how many Athenian citizens, sailors and soldiers did the plague wipe out?
Over 30,000
Even foreign mercenaries refused to hire themselves out to the stricken city.
Q 28Which hawkish Athenian politician boasted he could finish the Sphacteria affair, and did?
Cleon
Some 300 encircled Spartan hoplites surrendered, shattering Sparta's image of invincibility.
Q 29Sphacteria is a tiny island off which Peloponnesian site fortified by Demosthenes?
Pylos
The post attracted runaway helots, which is what goaded the Spartans into attacking.
Q 30The Spartan general Brasidas captured which Athenian colony in Thrace that controlled silver mines?
Amphipolis
Thucydides arrived too late to save it and was exiled, which is how he came to write his history.